Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS over NFS, poor performance with many small files

2009-01-26 Thread Roch

Eric D. Mudama writes:
 > On Tue, Jan 20 at 21:35, Eric D. Mudama wrote:
 > > On Tue, Jan 20 at  9:04, Richard Elling wrote:
 > >>
 > >> Yes.  And I think there are many more use cases which are not
 > >> yet characterized.  What we do know is that using an SSD for
 > >> the separate ZIL log works very well for a large number of cases.
 > >> It is not clear to me that the efforts to characterize a large
 > >> number of cases is worthwhile, when we can simply throw an SSD
 > >> at the problem and solve it.
 > >>  -- richard
 > >>
 > >
 > > I think the issue is, like a previous poster discovered, there's not a
 > > lot of available data on exact performance changes of adding ZIL/L2ARC
 > > devices in a variety of workloads, so people wind up spending money
 > > and doing lots of trial and error, without clear expectations of
 > > whether their modifications are working or not.
 > 
 > Sorry for that terrible last sentence, my brain is fried right now.
 > 
 > I was trying to say that most people don't know what they're going to
 > get out of an SSD or other ZIL/L2ARC device ahead of time, since it
 > varies so much by workload, configuration, etc. and it's an expensive
 > problem to solve through trial an error since these
 > performance-improving devices are many times more expensive than the
 > raw SAS/SATA devices in the main pool.
 > 

I agree with you on the L2ARC front but not on the SSD for
ZIL. We clearly expect 10X gain for lightly threaded
workloads and that's a big satifyer because not everything
happen with large amount of concurrency and some high value
tasks do not.

On the L2ARC  the benefit are less  direct because of the L1
ARC presence. The gains, if present will  be of the similar
nature with   8-10X  gain to   workloads  that  are  lightly
threaded  and served   from L2ARC vs   disk.  Note that it's
possible  to configurewhich   (higher businessvalue)
filesystems are allowed to install in the L2ARC.

One dirty way to evaluate if the  L2ARC will be effective in
your environment is to  consider if the  last X GB  of added
memory had a positive impact on your performance
metrics (does nailing down memory reduces performance ?).
If so then on the graph of performance vs caching you are
still on a positive slope and L2ARC is likely to help. When
request you care most about are served from caches, or
when something else saturates (e.g. total  CPU) then it's
time to stop.

-r



 > -- 
 > Eric D. Mudama
 > edmud...@mail.bounceswoosh.org
 > 
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS over NFS, poor performance with many small files

2009-01-26 Thread Roch

Eric D. Mudama writes:

 > On Mon, Jan 19 at 23:14, Greg Mason wrote:
 > >So, what we're looking for is a way to improve performance, without  
 > >disabling the ZIL, as it's my understanding that disabling the ZIL  
 > >isn't exactly a safe thing to do.
 > >
 > >We're looking for the best way to improve performance, without  
 > >sacrificing too much of the safety of the data.
 > >
 > >The current solution we are considering is disabling the cache  
 > >flushing (as per a previous response in this thread), and adding one  
 > >or two SSD log devices, as this is similar to the Sun storage  
 > >appliances based on the Thor. Thoughts?
 > 
 > In general principles, the evil tuning guide states that the ZIL
 > should be able to handle 10 seconds of expected synchronous write
 > workload.
 > 
 > To me, this implies that it's improving burst behavior, but
 > potentially at the expense of sustained throughput, like would be
 > measured in benchmarking type runs.
 > 
 > If you have a big JBOD array with say 8+ mirror vdevs on multiple
 > controllers, in theory, each VDEV can commit from 60-80MB/s to disk.
 > Unless you are attaching a separate ZIL device that can match the
 > aggregate throughput of that pool, wouldn't it just be better to have
 > the default behavior of the ZIL contents being inside the pool itself?
 > 
 > The best practices guide states that the max ZIL device size should be
 > roughly 50% of main system memory, because that's approximately the
 > most data that can be in-flight at any given instant.
 > 
 > "For a target throughput of X MB/sec and given that ZFS pushes
 > transaction groups every 5 seconds (and have 2 outstanding), we also
 > expect the ZIL to not grow beyond X MB/sec * 10 sec. So to service
 > 100MB/sec of synchronous writes, 1 GBytes of log device should be
 > sufficient."
 > 
 > But, no comments are made on the performance requirements of the ZIL
 > device(s) relative to the main pool devices.  Clicking around finds
 > this entry:
 > 
 > http://blogs.sun.com/perrin/entry/slog_blog_or_blogging_on
 > 
 > ...which appears to indicate cases where a significant number of ZILs
 > were required to match the bandwidth of just throwing them in the pool
 > itself.
 > 
 > 


Big topic. Some write requests are synchronous and some
not, some start as non synchronous and end up being synced.

For non-synchronous loads, ZFS does not commit data to the
slog. The presence of the slog is transparent and won't
hinder performance.

For synchronous loads, the performance is normally governed
by fewer threads commiting more modest amount of data;
performance here is dominated by latency effect, not disk
throughput and this is where a slog greatly helps (10X).

Now you're right to point out that some workloads might end
up as synchronous while still manageing large quantity of
data. The Storage 7000 line was tweaked to handle some of
those cases. So when commiting more say 10MB in a single
operation, the first MB will go to the SSD but the rest will
actually be send to the main storage pool. All these I/Os being
issued concurrently. The latency response of a 1 MB to our
SSD is expected to be similar to the response of regular
disks.


-r



 > --eric
 > 
 > 
 > -- 
 > Eric D. Mudama
 > edmud...@mail.bounceswoosh.org
 > 
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS over NFS, poor performance with many small files

2009-01-26 Thread Roch

Nicholas Lee writes:
 > Another option to look at is:
 > set zfs:zfs_nocacheflush=1
 > http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Evil_Tuning_Guide
 > 
 > Best option is to get a a fast ZIL log device.
 > 
 > 
 > Depends on your pool as well. NFS+ZFS means zfs will wait for write
 > completes before responding to a sync NFS write ops.  If you have a RAIDZ
 > array, writes will be slower than a RAID10 style pool.
 > 

Nicholas,

Raid-Z requires a  more complexity in software however
the total amount of I/O to disk is less than raid-10. So the
net performance effect is often in favor of Raid-10 must not necessarely
so.

-r

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS over NFS, poor performance with many small files

2009-01-26 Thread Roch
Greg Mason writes:
 > We're running into a performance problem with ZFS over NFS. When working 
 > with many small files (i.e. unpacking a tar file with source code), a 
 > Thor (over NFS) is about 4 times slower than our aging existing storage 
 > solution, which isn't exactly speedy to begin with (17 minutes versus 3 
 > minutes).
 > 
 > We took a rough stab in the dark, and started to examine whether or not 
 > it was the ZIL.
 > 
 > Performing IO tests locally on the Thor shows no real IO problems, but 
 > running IO tests over NFS, specifically, with many smaller files we see 
 > a significant performance hit.
 > 
 > Just to rule in or out the ZIL as a factor, we disabled it, and ran the 
 > test again. It completed in just under a minute, around 3 times faster 
 > than our existing storage. This was more like it!
 > 
 > Are there any tunables for the ZIL to try to speed things up? Or would 
 > it be best to look into using a high-speed SSD for the log device?
 > 
 > And, yes, I already know that turning off the ZIL is a Really Bad Idea. 
 > We do, however, need to provide our users with a certain level of 
 > performance, and what we've got with the ZIL on the pool is completely 
 > unacceptable.
 > 
 > Thanks for any pointers you may have...
 > 

I think you found out for the replies, this NFS issue is not
related to ZFS nor a ZIL malfunction in any way.

http://blogs.sun.com/roch/entry/nfs_and_zfs_a_fine 

NFS (particularly lightly threaded load)  is much speeded up
with any form of SSD|NVRAM storage and that's independant on
the backing filesystem used (provided the Filesystem is safe).

For ZFS the best way to acheive  NFS performance for lightly
threaded loads  is to have a   separate intent log  in a low
latency device such as in the 7000 line.

-r



 > --
 > 
 > Greg Mason
 > Systems Administrator
 > Michigan State University
 > High Performance Computing Center
 > ___
 > zfs-discuss mailing list
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS over NFS, poor performance with many small files

2009-01-20 Thread Eric D. Mudama
On Tue, Jan 20 at 21:35, Eric D. Mudama wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 20 at  9:04, Richard Elling wrote:
>>
>> Yes.  And I think there are many more use cases which are not
>> yet characterized.  What we do know is that using an SSD for
>> the separate ZIL log works very well for a large number of cases.
>> It is not clear to me that the efforts to characterize a large
>> number of cases is worthwhile, when we can simply throw an SSD
>> at the problem and solve it.
>>  -- richard
>>
>
> I think the issue is, like a previous poster discovered, there's not a
> lot of available data on exact performance changes of adding ZIL/L2ARC
> devices in a variety of workloads, so people wind up spending money
> and doing lots of trial and error, without clear expectations of
> whether their modifications are working or not.

Sorry for that terrible last sentence, my brain is fried right now.

I was trying to say that most people don't know what they're going to
get out of an SSD or other ZIL/L2ARC device ahead of time, since it
varies so much by workload, configuration, etc. and it's an expensive
problem to solve through trial an error since these
performance-improving devices are many times more expensive than the
raw SAS/SATA devices in the main pool.

-- 
Eric D. Mudama
edmud...@mail.bounceswoosh.org

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS over NFS, poor performance with many small files

2009-01-20 Thread Eric D. Mudama
On Tue, Jan 20 at  9:04, Richard Elling wrote:
>
> Yes.  And I think there are many more use cases which are not
> yet characterized.  What we do know is that using an SSD for
> the separate ZIL log works very well for a large number of cases.
> It is not clear to me that the efforts to characterize a large
> number of cases is worthwhile, when we can simply throw an SSD
> at the problem and solve it.
>  -- richard
>

I think the issue is, like a previous poster discovered, there's not a
lot of available data on exact performance changes of adding ZIL/L2ARC
devices in a variety of workloads, so people wind up spending money
and doing lots of trial and error, without clear expectations of
whether their modifications are working or not.


-- 
Eric D. Mudama
edmud...@mail.bounceswoosh.org

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS over NFS, poor performance with many small files

2009-01-20 Thread Marion Hakanson
d...@yahoo.com said:
> Any recommendations for an SSD to work with an X4500 server?  Will the SSDs
> used in the 7000 series servers work with X4500s or X4540s? 

The Sun System Handbook (sunsolve.sun.com) for the 7210 appliance (an
X4540-based system) lists the "logzilla" device with this fine print:
  PN#371-4192 Solid State disk drives can only be installed in slots 3 and 11.

Makes me wonder if they would work in our X4500 NFS server.  Our ZFS pool is
already deployed (Solaris-10), but we have four hot spares -- two of which
could be given up in favor of a mirrored ZIL.  An OS upgrade to S10U6 would
give the separate-log functionality, if the drivers, etc. supported the
actual SSD device.  I doubt we'll go out and buy them before finding out
if they'll actually work -- it would be a real shame if they didn't, though.

Regards,

Marion


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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS over NFS, poor performance with many small files

2009-01-20 Thread Doug
Any recommendations for an SSD to work with an X4500 server?  Will the SSDs 
used in the 7000 series servers work with X4500s or X4540s?
-- 
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS over NFS, poor performance with many small files

2009-01-20 Thread Richard Elling
Good observations, Eric, more below...

Eric D. Mudama wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 19 at 23:14, Greg Mason wrote:
>> So, what we're looking for is a way to improve performance, without  
>> disabling the ZIL, as it's my understanding that disabling the ZIL  
>> isn't exactly a safe thing to do.
>>
>> We're looking for the best way to improve performance, without  
>> sacrificing too much of the safety of the data.
>>
>> The current solution we are considering is disabling the cache  
>> flushing (as per a previous response in this thread), and adding one  
>> or two SSD log devices, as this is similar to the Sun storage  
>> appliances based on the Thor. Thoughts?
> 
> In general principles, the evil tuning guide states that the ZIL
> should be able to handle 10 seconds of expected synchronous write
> workload.
> 
> To me, this implies that it's improving burst behavior, but
> potentially at the expense of sustained throughput, like would be
> measured in benchmarking type runs.

Yes.  Workloads that tend to be latency sensitive also tend
to be bursty. Or, perhaps that is just how it feels to a user.
Similar observations are made in the GUI design business where
user interactions are bursty, but latency sensitive.

> If you have a big JBOD array with say 8+ mirror vdevs on multiple
> controllers, in theory, each VDEV can commit from 60-80MB/s to disk.
> Unless you are attaching a separate ZIL device that can match the
> aggregate throughput of that pool, wouldn't it just be better to have
> the default behavior of the ZIL contents being inside the pool itself?

The problem is that the ZIL writes must be committed to disk
and magnetic disks rotate.  So the time to commit to media is,
on average, disregarding seeks, 1/2 the rotational period.
This ranges from 2 ms (15k rpm) to 5.5 ms (5,400 rpm). If the
workload is something like a tar -x of small files (source code)
then a 4.17 ms (7,200 rpm) disk would limit my extraction to a
maximum of 240 files/s.  If these are 4kByte files, the bandwidth
would peak at about 1 MByte/s.  Upgrading to a 15k rpm disk would
move the peak to about 500 files/s or 2.25 MBytes/s.  Using a
decent SSD would change this to 5000 files/s or 22.5 MBytes/s.

> The best practices guide states that the max ZIL device size should be
> roughly 50% of main system memory, because that's approximately the
> most data that can be in-flight at any given instant.

There is a little bit of discussion about this point, because
it really speaks to the ARC in general.  Look for it to be
clarified soon.  Also note that this is much more of a problem
for small memory machines.

> "For a target throughput of X MB/sec and given that ZFS pushes
> transaction groups every 5 seconds (and have 2 outstanding), we also
> expect the ZIL to not grow beyond X MB/sec * 10 sec. So to service
> 100MB/sec of synchronous writes, 1 GBytes of log device should be
> sufficient."

It is a little bit more complicated than that because if the size
of the ZIL write is > 32 kBYtes, then it will be written directly
to the main pool, not the ZIL log.  This is because if you have
lots of large synchronous writes, then the system can become
bandwidth limited rather than latency limited and the way to solve
bandwidth problems is to reduce bandwidth demand.

> But, no comments are made on the performance requirements of the ZIL
> device(s) relative to the main pool devices.  Clicking around finds
> this entry:
> 
> http://blogs.sun.com/perrin/entry/slog_blog_or_blogging_on
> 
> ...which appears to indicate cases where a significant number of ZILs
> were required to match the bandwidth of just throwing them in the pool
> itself.

Yes.  And I think there are many more use cases which are not
yet characterized.  What we do know is that using an SSD for
the separate ZIL log works very well for a large number of cases.
It is not clear to me that the efforts to characterize a large
number of cases is worthwhile, when we can simply throw an SSD
at the problem and solve it.
  -- richard

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS over NFS, poor performance with many small files

2009-01-19 Thread Eric D. Mudama
On Mon, Jan 19 at 23:14, Greg Mason wrote:
>So, what we're looking for is a way to improve performance, without  
>disabling the ZIL, as it's my understanding that disabling the ZIL  
>isn't exactly a safe thing to do.
>
>We're looking for the best way to improve performance, without  
>sacrificing too much of the safety of the data.
>
>The current solution we are considering is disabling the cache  
>flushing (as per a previous response in this thread), and adding one  
>or two SSD log devices, as this is similar to the Sun storage  
>appliances based on the Thor. Thoughts?

In general principles, the evil tuning guide states that the ZIL
should be able to handle 10 seconds of expected synchronous write
workload.

To me, this implies that it's improving burst behavior, but
potentially at the expense of sustained throughput, like would be
measured in benchmarking type runs.

If you have a big JBOD array with say 8+ mirror vdevs on multiple
controllers, in theory, each VDEV can commit from 60-80MB/s to disk.
Unless you are attaching a separate ZIL device that can match the
aggregate throughput of that pool, wouldn't it just be better to have
the default behavior of the ZIL contents being inside the pool itself?

The best practices guide states that the max ZIL device size should be
roughly 50% of main system memory, because that's approximately the
most data that can be in-flight at any given instant.

"For a target throughput of X MB/sec and given that ZFS pushes
transaction groups every 5 seconds (and have 2 outstanding), we also
expect the ZIL to not grow beyond X MB/sec * 10 sec. So to service
100MB/sec of synchronous writes, 1 GBytes of log device should be
sufficient."

But, no comments are made on the performance requirements of the ZIL
device(s) relative to the main pool devices.  Clicking around finds
this entry:

http://blogs.sun.com/perrin/entry/slog_blog_or_blogging_on

...which appears to indicate cases where a significant number of ZILs
were required to match the bandwidth of just throwing them in the pool
itself.


--eric


-- 
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edmud...@mail.bounceswoosh.org

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS over NFS, poor performance with many small files

2009-01-19 Thread Greg Mason
>
> Good idea.  Thor has a CF slot, too, if you can find a high speed
> CF card.
> -- richard

We're already using the CF slot for the OS. We haven't really found  
any CF cards that would be fast enough anyways :)


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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS over NFS, poor performance with many small files

2009-01-19 Thread Bob Friesenhahn
On Mon, 19 Jan 2009, Greg Mason wrote:

> The current solution we are considering is disabling the cache
> flushing (as per a previous response in this thread), and adding one
> or two SSD log devices, as this is similar to the Sun storage
> appliances based on the Thor. Thoughts?

You need to add some sort of fast non-volatile cache.

The Sun storage appliances are actually using battery backed DRAM for 
their write caches.  This sort of hardware is quite rare.

Fast SSD log devices are apparently pretty expensive.  Some of the 
ones for sale are actually pretty slow.

Bob
==
Bob Friesenhahn
bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS over NFS, poor performance with many small files

2009-01-19 Thread Richard Elling
Greg Mason wrote:
> So, what we're looking for is a way to improve performance, without 
> disabling the ZIL, as it's my understanding that disabling the ZIL isn't 
> exactly a safe thing to do.
> 
> We're looking for the best way to improve performance, without 
> sacrificing too much of the safety of the data.
> 
> The current solution we are considering is disabling the cache flushing 
> (as per a previous response in this thread), and adding one or two SSD 
> log devices, as this is similar to the Sun storage appliances based on 
> the Thor. Thoughts?

Good idea.  Thor has a CF slot, too, if you can find a high speed
CF card.
  -- richard


> -Greg
> 
> On Jan 19, 2009, at 6:24 PM, Richard Elling wrote:
>>>
>>> We took a rough stab in the dark, and started to examine whether or 
>>> not it was the ZIL.
>>
>> It is. I've recently added some clarification to this section in the
>> Evil Tuning Guide which might help you to arrive at a better solution.
>> http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Evil_Tuning_Guide#Disabling_the_ZIL_.28Don.27t.29
>>  
>>
>> Feedback is welcome.
>> -- richard
> 
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS over NFS, poor performance with many small files

2009-01-19 Thread Greg Mason
So, what we're looking for is a way to improve performance, without  
disabling the ZIL, as it's my understanding that disabling the ZIL  
isn't exactly a safe thing to do.

We're looking for the best way to improve performance, without  
sacrificing too much of the safety of the data.

The current solution we are considering is disabling the cache  
flushing (as per a previous response in this thread), and adding one  
or two SSD log devices, as this is similar to the Sun storage  
appliances based on the Thor. Thoughts?

-Greg

On Jan 19, 2009, at 6:24 PM, Richard Elling wrote:
>>
>> We took a rough stab in the dark, and started to examine whether or  
>> not it was the ZIL.
>
> It is. I've recently added some clarification to this section in the
> Evil Tuning Guide which might help you to arrive at a better solution.
> http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Evil_Tuning_Guide#Disabling_the_ZIL_.28Don.27t.29
> Feedback is welcome.
> -- richard

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS over NFS, poor performance with many small files

2009-01-19 Thread Richard Elling
Greg Mason wrote:
> We're running into a performance problem with ZFS over NFS. When working 
> with many small files (i.e. unpacking a tar file with source code), a 
> Thor (over NFS) is about 4 times slower than our aging existing storage 
> solution, which isn't exactly speedy to begin with (17 minutes versus 3 
> minutes).
> 
> We took a rough stab in the dark, and started to examine whether or not 
> it was the ZIL.

It is. I've recently added some clarification to this section in the
Evil Tuning Guide which might help you to arrive at a better solution.
http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Evil_Tuning_Guide#Disabling_the_ZIL_.28Don.27t.29
Feedback is welcome.
  -- richard

> Performing IO tests locally on the Thor shows no real IO problems, but 
> running IO tests over NFS, specifically, with many smaller files we see 
> a significant performance hit.
> 
> Just to rule in or out the ZIL as a factor, we disabled it, and ran the 
> test again. It completed in just under a minute, around 3 times faster 
> than our existing storage. This was more like it!
> 
> Are there any tunables for the ZIL to try to speed things up? Or would 
> it be best to look into using a high-speed SSD for the log device?
> 
> And, yes, I already know that turning off the ZIL is a Really Bad Idea. 
> We do, however, need to provide our users with a certain level of 
> performance, and what we've got with the ZIL on the pool is completely 
> unacceptable.
> 
> Thanks for any pointers you may have...
> 
> --
> 
> Greg Mason
> Systems Administrator
> Michigan State University
> High Performance Computing Center
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS over NFS, poor performance with many small files

2009-01-19 Thread Nicholas Lee
Another option to look at is:
set zfs:zfs_nocacheflush=1
http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Evil_Tuning_Guide

Best option is to get a a fast ZIL log device.


Depends on your pool as well. NFS+ZFS means zfs will wait for write
completes before responding to a sync NFS write ops.  If you have a RAIDZ
array, writes will be slower than a RAID10 style pool.


On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 11:08 AM, Greg Mason  wrote:

> We're running into a performance problem with ZFS over NFS. When working
> with many small files (i.e. unpacking a tar file with source code), a
> Thor (over NFS) is about 4 times slower than our aging existing storage
> solution, which isn't exactly speedy to begin with (17 minutes versus 3
> minutes).
>
> We took a rough stab in the dark, and started to examine whether or not
> it was the ZIL.
>
> Performing IO tests locally on the Thor shows no real IO problems, but
> running IO tests over NFS, specifically, with many smaller files we see
> a significant performance hit.
>
> Just to rule in or out the ZIL as a factor, we disabled it, and ran the
> test again. It completed in just under a minute, around 3 times faster
> than our existing storage. This was more like it!
>
> Are there any tunables for the ZIL to try to speed things up? Or would
> it be best to look into using a high-speed SSD for the log device?
>
> And, yes, I already know that turning off the ZIL is a Really Bad Idea.
> We do, however, need to provide our users with a certain level of
> performance, and what we've got with the ZIL on the pool is completely
> unacceptable.
>
> Thanks for any pointers you may have...
>
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[zfs-discuss] ZFS over NFS, poor performance with many small files

2009-01-19 Thread Greg Mason
We're running into a performance problem with ZFS over NFS. When working 
with many small files (i.e. unpacking a tar file with source code), a 
Thor (over NFS) is about 4 times slower than our aging existing storage 
solution, which isn't exactly speedy to begin with (17 minutes versus 3 
minutes).

We took a rough stab in the dark, and started to examine whether or not 
it was the ZIL.

Performing IO tests locally on the Thor shows no real IO problems, but 
running IO tests over NFS, specifically, with many smaller files we see 
a significant performance hit.

Just to rule in or out the ZIL as a factor, we disabled it, and ran the 
test again. It completed in just under a minute, around 3 times faster 
than our existing storage. This was more like it!

Are there any tunables for the ZIL to try to speed things up? Or would 
it be best to look into using a high-speed SSD for the log device?

And, yes, I already know that turning off the ZIL is a Really Bad Idea. 
We do, however, need to provide our users with a certain level of 
performance, and what we've got with the ZIL on the pool is completely 
unacceptable.

Thanks for any pointers you may have...

--

Greg Mason
Systems Administrator
Michigan State University
High Performance Computing Center
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